


Unburied

by Owlix



Series: Confined Spaces [4]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Politics, Pre-War, Short, dealing with the after-effects of shadowplay, internalized negative thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-22
Updated: 2018-01-22
Packaged: 2019-03-08 04:18:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13450389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Owlix/pseuds/Owlix
Summary: Sometimes, Megatron struggles to stay above ground when the whole world wants to bury him.





	Unburied

**Author's Note:**

> I thought this might be too short for AO3, but decided to post it here anyway in the interest of completion.

Megatron refused to let it bury him.

Sometimes it threatened to. Not the dust and silt, the endless painful manual labor, the ache of untreated damage, the deeper, more profound ache of fear that he pretended couldn’t touch him.

All that was difficult. But Megatron had the strength to carry heavy loads, to bear difficult, painful things. That pain couldn’t break him. That fear couldn’t bury him. That alone wasn’t enough.

It was the words they said that threatened sometimes to pull him under.

The words they said and the words they didn’t have to say, the assumptions that were built so deeply into their society that no one had to speak them out loud any more than they had to clarify which way was up. Concepts that Megatron had come online pre-programmed with, that he’d spent all his life rejecting, that he was still immersed in, every moment, inescapable.

Even with this, usually,  _usually_ , Megatron could keep above the surface. He knew they were lies. He’d always known somehow, spark-deep, since he’d been very young. He’d spent his whole life trying to understand just how far the lies went, following them like veins of nucleon in rock, searching for the source. Trying to understand. Because on some level, he’d always planned to find the heart of those lies. To uncover the truth and make it known.

What dragged him under, sometimes, was hearing those lies  _in his own head._ Hearing them  _in his own voice_.

Megatron didn’t believe them. He’d  _never_ believed them, not really. But immersed in them like this, those lies had drilled their way inside of him and made a home there. The Functionists had trained him to internalize them by sheer brute force of repetition.

Sometimes it worked. Sometimes, no matter how he tried, it worked.

Megatron looked at his reflection in the near-dark of the mines of Croteus 12, exhausted and empty and alone.

Those words in his head, years of propaganda, told him that he was worthless. A miner, good only for manual labor, not worth the money to repair when he was damaged, certainly not worth being heard when he spoke. Those words told him that he should shut up, should fall in line. He was a fool for trying to be more than what he really was. Not just a fool, but a troublemaker, hurting others with his selfishness. This world would be better off without him.

For a moment, Megatron couldn’t stay above the surface; for a moment he was floundering in the dark and everything seemed lost. For a moment, he believed, and came to doubt. The bulwarks he’d built gave out. The rock poured in.

_Worthless. Worse than worthless. You’re not smart enough to find your way out of this, and your doomed cause drags everyone you associate with to a bad end. Impactor, in prison. Terminus, abandoned and dead. You’re not a revolutionary, just a broken miner. A defective tool._

Lies. All lies. Megatron knew it, but they were so  _loud_ –- the noise in his head had gotten worse since, since Messatine, since--

And there was no one to reach a hand towards him and pull him back to his feet when he fell. No one to dig him out when he’d been buried. Not any more.

Impactor had been that, once. His grim confidence that all of his superiors were full of slag, that the entire Functionist system was exactly what Megatron had always known it for – he had been a bulwark against the crumbling rock. Impactor never wavered.

Impactor would have draped his drill-arm across Megatron’s shoulders, laughed at him for getting so emotional. He would’ve dragged Megatron out drinking, until the noise and the lights drowned out the Functionist lies echoing in Megatron’s head.

He would’ve said, “Read me some poetry,” just to make Megatron feel better. Just to help Megatron drown out those terrible lies with his own truth, to speak over them with his own words.

Terminus had been that, too. His faith in Megatron’s words had been different than Impactor’s. Impactor had believed that Megatron was right, and had recognized that the words were something Megatron needed, even as he’d viewed them as foolish indulgence; Terminus had believed that Megatron’s words could change the world.

They were both gone. Terminus was dead. Impactor was in prison off-world, completely out of Megatron’s reach. And Megatron had sworn to leave them, to leave  _everyone_ behind. He would not get attached. Not again. Not when his cause was so important. **  
**

But somehow they still mattered. Any light in a cave-in. Any outstretched hand, when you were falling.

 

 


End file.
